environmental humanities: Histories and Futures
Course Description
This graduate-level seminar is an intensive introduction to the field of Environmental Humanities. The course has several aims: to historicize Environmental Humanities’ emergence as a field (to understand the multiple factors—both ecological and institutional—that have generated its growth and consolidation over the past several decades), to acquaint students with the various methods and approaches that characterize work in Environmental Humanities, and to provide opportunities for developing a pedagogical program and research project in the field. Throughout the course, we’ll be attuned to the diverse stakeholders who comprise this far-from-unified area. Together, we’ll work to develop an account of Environmental Humanities ourselves, bearing a number of questions in mind. What shared values (sustainability? social justice? multi-species justice? truth?) unite—or, at the very least, loosely organize—the set of attitudes, practices, and political/institutional positions that are part of Environmental Humanities? What is the role of history and the historical fields within this sometimes very present-oriented field? How do we assess and interpret historical texts produced by authors who were themselves unaware of the precise ecological consequences of their society’s actions and technologies? What do literary forms and genres have to do with environmental questions and challenges? And how, finally, might the field of Environmental Humanities impact both English studies and literary studies?
Course Overview
The course has three major units. The first is an overview of the history of Environmental Humanities (its emergence out of and critique of earlier environmental movements in the Unites States) and some of its major concepts and theorists. Topics will include some, if not all, of the following: conservation and the land ethic, environmental racism and environmental justice, waste and toxicity, climate change, the Anthropocene, posthumanism, feminist/queer materialisms, and multispecies ethics. Authors will likely include Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Raymond Williams, William Cronon, Ramachandra Guha, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rob Nixon, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Dana Luciano, Mel Chen, Vanessa Agard-Jones, Joe Masco, Neel Ahuja, Traci Voyles, and Axelle Karera.
In the second unit, we’ll do a deep dive into a particular Environmental Humanities topic, taking a longue durée approach. The topic of this unit might change from year to year, depending on student interests and developments in the world/field. Topics might be, for example, energy or water. Taking energy as an example, we’d ask how human cultures have interacted with changing energy economies and regimes. How have cultural and literary objects registered and represented energy resources, dependencies, and their historical transformations? How and when have they failed to represent them at all? And how have views about the abundance or scarcity of energy impacted social relations, including the definitions of the human and human capacity? What kinds of creatures have we become as a result of our reliance on fossil fuels? We’d begin this unit in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Britain transitioned from an organic economy (with fuel derived, for instance, from wood and charcoal) to a mineral economy based on coal, as the historian E.A. Wrigley has argued. The unit would conclude with a set of readings related to our petrochemical present and the impact of our fossil-fuel dependency on climate change. Authors might include Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Blake, Jules Verne, Upton Sinclair, and Chris Abani; as well as critics such as Tobias Menely, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Stephanie LeMenager, Amitov Ghosh, and Imre Szeman. We would also look at creative projects by Laurie Palmer, Kate Orff, and Richard Misrach.
The third and final unit of the course will be student-driven. Students will work in pairs or small teams to come up with a set of texts and materials, as well as a plan for discussion. These teaching presentations will serve as the basis for final research papers or creative and/or public-facing projects.